Via rail deals toronto to winnipeg

VIA Rail Canada

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One trip has been on mine for years: So I decided it was time to do it. The lounge begins to fill up with people and I get my first look at my fellow riders. There are couples, young and old, and a few single travelers like me.

Just before 10 p. Leaving Toronto, we pass factories, modern flats, graffiti, lofts, and a greenhouse and then the sky opens up and I can see stars. I wake up to the sun breaking over Markham , Ontario, and take about 50 photos trying to capture the color-rich scene. The train pulls into Sudbury Junction in Greater Sudbury , a city built on the mining and lumber industries.

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Breakfast is served from 6: Is this your first time on the train? Any would-be awkward pauses are filled by looking out the huge windows to take in the scenery.

At my table are a couple from outside Toronto who are traveling to Jasper and a former gold miner traveling home to Victoria after an extended stay in Sudbury. The rest of the day I spend in the domed Skyline Car and my own cabin.

Riding the rails from Toronto to Vancouver is a once-in-a-lifetime smorgasbord of scenery.

There are three classes of service on the Canadian—economy, sleeper where I am , and Prestige. The relatively new Prestige class offers even more luxury: After dinner some folks head to the Park Car at the rear of the train for conversation, coffee, and music by local artists traveling with us. I head back to my cabin, tired from a hard day of sightseeing. This is my favorite part of train travel: At breakfast I sit with a young couple from Yorkshire, England, who are traveling around the world.

They talked about doing this for years and heading off to travel the globe. Before noon we arrive in Winnipeg, where we have our first stopover, three hours to explore the city while the train is serviced and restocked. Via Rail offers a bus tour of the city but I choose to wander on my own, heading over to The Forks. Named for the junction of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, this section of downtown draws more than four million visitors a year. A main attraction is The Forks Market , an indoor emporium housed in former horse stables.

Nearby is the striking Canadian Museum for Human Rights , which opened in I spend the afternoon in my cabin, mesmerized by the scenery. The trees and lakes of Ontario have been replaced by prairie, beautiful vast stretches of amber and green laid out under a huge sky. This is my favorite landscape, I think. But on the regional route north to Churchill, it's the unstable track itself that slows everything down. Those 1, kilometres were completed in by the federal government, much of it on permafrost.

These days, the track is owned by an American company called Omnitrax. It's responsible for the upkeep with help from the federal government , but until the hundreds of tricky spots are fixed, trains must travel excruciatingly slowly. If it's a hot day, they move even more slowly.

And when that happens, the train stops moving for eight hours. But misery can be a good icebreaker. I get to talking with Steve, a student spending his summer touring Canada by train. He shows me videos on his iPad of the train-delay party he got swept up in at Toronto's Union Station. Musicians heading west on the electronica Full Flex Express tour groaned when a four-hour delay was announced. But there is no free-flowing vodka on our slow ride to Churchill. Regional trains have far fewer frills than the Canadian.

Goodbye all-day complimentary tea, coffee and snacks even if you're paying for meal service , no more wine-tasting classes, or intimate concerts from travelling musicians. Via's mandate for regional service is simply to provide a transit service for the many tiny remote communities it serves. On the train to Churchill, passengers don't seem to mind the drop in service, or the older, mustier sleeping cars.

The train staff are as helpful and cheery as ever and we're all in vacation mode, happy to skip the stress of security unlike at the airport, no one even looks at your bags and share stories or play cards with our neighbours instead of ignoring them. Being late becomes our new normal. Via's Woelcke wasn't surprised to hear that. This frontier town of just more than , half indigenous, half non-native, must rely more than ever on its natural attractions — polar bears, beluga whales and the barren beauty of the tundra — to survive.

On the edge of Churchill, a deep-water port and enormous grain elevator sit empty, waiting for grain trains that don't come it used to be a popular spot to ship goods over the Arctic Ocean. Built in , the port looks abandoned: No one fixes the broken windows or replaces the peeling paint. Only half a dozen ships arrived in , and the federal subsidy that ensures some freight is still shipped this far north ends in , though the town is hoping it is renewed.

Many who live here stay just for "the seasons" whale: July and August; polar bear: A cargo plane once crashed in the tundra outside the Churchill airport. Summer visitors may come for the whales, but Churchill, built on the migration path of polar bears, is better known as "the polar bear capital of the world. When a cargo plane crashes just outside the airport, why bother moving it? Let it sit on the rocks, shredded metal and all, as a place for the kids, the tourists and the polar bears to hang out.

So it's a surprise the next day to hear a shopkeeper wave off the danger, telling a nervous woman from San Francisco, "You want to see bears? Rent a car, pack a lunch and a bottle of wine, and go out for a drive. But that sounds more like setting yourself up as bait. But out on the water we can hear them.

When our guide tells us that the curious whales respond to high-pitched singing and noises, our son — whose voice hasn't broken yet — squeals into action. Soon, we're surrounded and followed by families of three-to-four-metre-long beluga adults and smaller calves. Our guide weaves stories about the hard life of trappers, traders and Hudson's Bay Co.

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The fort is on an isolated point. A frigid wind chills us to the bone, but we can't move too quickly back to the boat. Our guide, with a big gun slung over her shoulder, scans the rocks around us constantly for bears. We see no bears, but try to warm our bellies with handfuls of crowberries , bearberries , cranberries and gooseberries scooped off the glacial scarred rocks.

The log-cabin look of the restaurant even the menu comes in a wooden booklet and lodge is more charming than cheesy. Exhausted from our exploits, we suck back tea and hot chocolate in the lobby and study an odd map on the wall. It displays the world from a Northern perspective. Toronto our centre of the universe doesn't even rate a pinpoint. I find the juxtaposition of time on a train is more pronounced. As the scenery rushes by outside, time feels suspended inside — you can't wait to get out at the next whistle stop and feel the sun on your skin.

Then, on the station platform, time speeds up. Download the mobile app.

Toronto-Winnipeg train

Open popup. Beginning of the main content. See all discounts. Fares valid only for travel between the two stations indicated in each offer. Not valid for travel between intermediate stations located on the same route. Stopovers are not allowed. Fares for sleeper accommodations are quoted per person based on single occupancy in upper berths, lower berths and cabins for one, and on double occupancy in double berths and cabins for two.

Note that a surcharge applies for single occupancy in double berths and cabins for two.

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